From the Editor: Portland’s Best Restaurants

For my 14th birthday, my mother took me to dinner at the late, great Italian destination Genoa, now home to La Patroncita on SE Belmont Street. For decades, my mother had collected copies of Bon Appétit, and I would flip through their wrinkled and sauce-stained pages fantasizing about the restaurants I would visit. This meal at Genoa was the first of what would become hundreds of tasting menus over the course of my career. Soon after taking our seats, my mom and I received teacups with a fir-green liquid that smelled of bitter lemon and forest. “Sorrel puree,” a server said, evaporating soon afterward. My mother and I stared at each other with mounting anxiety. “How do we eat it?” I whispered. Her shrug was no comfort. When our server reappeared, he gave us the most charming of guidance: “Just knock it back, darlin’!” 

It was a subtle way to drain the tension from our table. He met us where we were; he understood what we needed beyond what we requested. The meal that followed was a memorable one, particularly thanks to a verdant pea tendril and sugar snap salad with fresh ricotta. But I think of that server often, and what he taught me about hospitality. 

Genoa may be gone, but its ethos remains within Portland’s food world. Chefs here sap inspiration and ingredients from the region’s woodlands and farms, rivers and oceans, morphing menus as the months pass. But the scene, while world-class, is also mellower, more laid-back. It’s why we continue to bring home James Beard Awards, why chefs move from larger cities to cook here—more room to experiment, without the pretentiousness. 

After six years covering the city’s restaurant world at Eater Portland, I began my tenure as Portland Monthly’s new editor in chief at a serendipitous time: we were building this issue, including its exhaustively researched guide to the city’s 50 best restaurants. It was a massive undertaking, tackled by a fleet of editors and contributors over several months. 

The restaurants within its pages greeted me like old friends: the “in-the-know neighborhood jewel” that is Bellwether Bar and “the sexy food and drink cave” that houses Scotch Lodge; the “liquid poems” found at Rose VL Deli and the springy-crisp red rice shrimp rolls at dim sum palace Excellent Cuisine.

A great restaurant is about more than what arrives on the plate. It’s about the context in which it arrives, the energy of the room, the stories that accompany each course, the team’s ethos. Portland’s best restaurants don’t share a singular narrative; however, you will often encounter a balance of meticulousness and nonchalance, imagination and casual warmth. Beyond our restaurant guide—beyond this issue—I hope you find a similar through line, whether we’re covering precarious wolf packs or whipped ricotta toast. I hope we meet you where you are. 

Brooke Jackson-Glidden
Editor in chief